Working in painting, bookmaking, illustration, collage, performance, and sculpture, Oliver Jeffers joins to talk about his career making art and telling stories. His new book, Begin Again, explores humankind’s impact on itself and our planet, asking the big question: Where do we go from here?
Oliver Jeffers:
This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures, really, truly. And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. And it’s a bombardment and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.
Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, artist and picture book author, Oliver Jeffers, talks about his career and about reframing humanity’s problems.
Oliver Jeffers:
We prioritize being right over wrong, but if we replace the words right and wrong with better and worse, it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen.
Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers came on the podcast eight years ago in 2015 to talk about his work as an illustrator, artist, designer, and author. We had a lot to talk about back then, and we have a lot more to talk about now because Oliver Jeffers has been busy. He has written and illustrated several more New York Times bestselling books for children. Helped make an animated film based on his work, which won an Emmy Award, and has had exhibits of his artwork all infused with his particular brand of contagious optimism. His latest effort is his first illustrated book for readers of all ages. It’s called Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. He joins me today to talk about that and so much more. Oliver Jeffers, welcome back to Design Matters.
Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie. I can’t believe it’s been eight years.
Debbie Millman:
I can’t either.
Oliver Jeffers:
It’s just gone by in the blink of an eye.
Debbie Millman:
And I love how our friendship has evolved in that time too. When I first interviewed you, I barely knew you at all. I was so nervous. I’m still a little nervous, but now I’m a lot more comfortable.
Oliver Jeffers:
We know each other well and I am also prepared for how thoroughly you do your research.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope I don’t disappoint you. Before we talk about some of the newer things that you’ve been doing, because there’s so much to talk about, my first question is one I’ve asked you before, but I love your answer and I love hearing more and more every time you tell me. You learned to draw by looking at John Singer Sargent’s ears in his paintings.
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I learned to paint by-
Debbie Millman:
To paint. Yes. There is a difference between drawing and painting. I should be clear.
Oliver Jeffers:
I think I learned to draw by copying the comic book strip Asterix.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And even now thinking back on it, it might well be why there’s still bendy legs and arms. None of my characters seem to have elbows or knees. And then looking back, showing them to my son now, it was like, oh yeah. So I would just copy them and then figure out just the way in which I drew a line differed slightly from the way that he drew line and that I enjoyed it. But the painting thing, I didn’t really have any formal training as a painter, and I considered myself, I’m going to be a painter and was making paintings and then figured out I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I think a big part of art is just getting in and experimenting with materials to see what they can do for you.
But the way that he figuratively paints an ear, when you’re up close, it looks like it’s three simple gestures done in a burst of energy. But when you step back, it looks like a human ear. It looks like it’s alive. And I couldn’t really figure out how he did that. And it just was painting the idea of life rather than making it look like a photograph in every single tiny gesture. And years later, I learned that, yeah, he did do it in three or four strokes, but what you look at might’ve been the 50th or 60th attempt at doing so, which made me feel a little better.
Debbie Millman:
Have you figured out how he was able to achieve that type of realistic accuracy with so few strokes?
Oliver Jeffers:
I think he just was a very adept observer. He knew his materials and he could see color in pretty beautifully and unique ways. To be honest, no, I never figured it out. The man had a wonderful skillset and it just seemed to come from him naturally.
Debbie Millman:
It first occurred to you that there was power in art when you were nine years old. You were asked to step out of class to make a set for the school play. What kind of power did that give you?
Oliver Jeffers:
It gave me, I think, a bit of purpose and a bit of value. The power being that I can use art as an excuse to not do other things, partly, but then no two human beings are exactly alike. And a lot of the Western education system is teaching everybody exactly the same things. And I do believe it’s changing somewhat now, but when I went to school, it was like everybody had to do geography and English and mathematics and science and some of those things some people are good at and some of them they weren’t. And I wasn’t a great student and whenever the art came along and that had a practical application in the real world, that was that this is maybe something that I can do because I enjoy it and I’m good at it.
Debbie Millman:
How did you know you were good at it?
Oliver Jeffers:
Because they asked me to step out of geography class to help design the set of the school play. And I think back then I knew that I had an ability to be able to make something that looked like something I wanted it to and for it to be visually satisfying, even just to me.
Debbie Millman:
How did your understanding of power in and with art evolve after that experience?
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, after that experience … That was in primary school. And in secondary school, I went to school in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. And back then … What year did I start secondary school? It would’ve been 1990 maybe. The education system in Northern Ireland was divided. It was segregated between Catholics and Protestants. And the school that my parents sent me to was one of the first integrated schools where both Catholics and Protestants went together. And because not a lot of people were on board with that, the numbers were very low and to qualify for basic funding from the government, they had to take in all the kids that were kicked out of all the other schools, including all the rough schools.
So some of the toughest roughest kids in Belfast were going to this school. None of them cared about education. There was a lot of violence. And I recognized that art had currency because some of these kids were coming to me to ask me to draw their favorite band on their school bag or make a design underneath their skateboard. And then I sort of fell under, not their protection, but they’re like, “Oh, he’s okay. Leave him alone.” But it was something I had to offer to my peers, and it really helped me through school because my parents were encouraging me to be an artist. I was not mocked for it in a school where everybody was being mocked for having an interest in anything. And as I say, it was something that I enjoyed and it gave me value.
Debbie Millman:
Did being around rough kids force you to be rough, or were you able to have some sort of boundaries around who you were and what you needed to be?
Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never had any interest in violence or roughness, but it did teach me a way to be able to speak in a way that I think somebody else will understand. So I could adapt and I could hold different ideas in my head at the same time and I learned to be able to say and show something in one way that these kids would get it or saying something in another way that these adults would get it. And so yeah, that duality really started to seep into my work back then.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think it’s still there?
Oliver Jeffers:
The duality is absolutely still there. Again, growing up in Northern Ireland, we used to joke that we were bilingual because we could speak both Catholic and Protestant. You knew how to pass the test by going through a certain area or a certain neighborhood. But even the visual language of duality is something I recognize came from back there. Like there’s a graphic nature using typography that definitely came from the loyalist militant murals that were peppered everywhere. And then there’s a whimsy and a narrative, folky charm that came from the Catholic murals that were everywhere around. So yes, the dualities … I think nothing is ever directly simple in one single thing and I could see the truth in that at an early age.
Debbie Millman:
You just mentioned your parents were encouraging of your art talent. There are a lot of creative people in your family. One uncle is a documentary filmmaker, another uncle organized festivals and wrote poetry and painted murals in Belfast. Did that give you a sense from an early age that being an artist was a viable career for you?
Oliver Jeffers:
Not really, because neither of them were particularly successful when I was young. But my mom and dad were both quite enlightened, and my dad was a teacher for years, and he always thought that the way the education system was set up there was fundamentally wrong. He always said that the two most difficult things a human being learns to do is how to walk and how to talk. And yet when you get into school, the first thing you’re told is to sit down and shut up.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I love that.
Oliver Jeffers:
He always told us that remembering a lot of facts doesn’t prove intelligence. It just proves you’ve got a good memory. And the sheer sign of intelligence in another human being is curiosity and imagination. He could see that I was interested in something and so we were encouraged. Me and my older brother both went to art college. And when I met my wife who studied engineering, I was the first person she’d ever met who didn’t have a proper job. And I didn’t quite realize the rarity of that until I was a bit older.
Debbie Millman:
You said that everything in your life changed as an artist when you learned to stop copying others and listened to the way your hands wanted to draw and paint. I find that so interesting given the very first thing we talked about was how you were copying the comics. How did your hands want to draw and paint?
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I think whenever anybody is seriously considering being an artist, you go through that phase of being inspired and imitating as a way to find what it is that you’re capable of doing. But at a certain point, you have to progress beyond that and find your own voice, really. So when people have asked, how did you find your style, I realize that you don’t really find your style, your style finds you. You just get out of the way of that. You know the way you would say sometimes, oh, that person can’t draw a straight line as a way to say that they’re not very good at drawing? Nobody can draw a straight line.
Debbie Millman:
Agnes Martin.
Oliver Jeffers:
Okay, apart from Agnes Martin. Is that true?
Debbie Millman:
Uh-huh.
Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Apparently she did-
Oliver Jeffers:
How long?
Debbie Millman:
All of her drawings, all of her grids she did by hand.
Oliver Jeffers:
What?
Debbie Millman:
I don’t even understand how that’s humanly possible so maybe it’s not really true.
Oliver Jeffers:
But I don’t think that takes away from the point. Most human beings’ attempt to draw a straight line is never perfect, but all those wiggles and bumps in that attempt, that is your style. That is the way your hand likes to move and how to draw. And yes, at a certain point you realize that no piece of art ever ends up the way that you think it will. And what’s important is to react to what you’re making as you go along rather than keep trying to change it so that it fits this preconceived notion of what it’s going to be. So to react to the real world. But at around that time when I was in art college, the reason that I wanted to make art was brought into question and I think it was that epiphany that changed the way that I was doing it, where yes, I was in the process of finding my style, but I was also always looking for validation externally. For the teacher to say I had done a good job or for other people to think I was cool and like me.
And at one point I put my hand up, this is an art college in foundation year and had a great art professor painter called Dennis McBride, and I’ve put my hand up trying to get him to talk about my work. And he just turned around and he says, “Oliver, you’re like a child always looking for sweets. Who do you make art for?” And it really hit home because I was stunned that he’d called me out like that. But as I thought about it into the evening, I was like, “I don’t know if I like the answer.” Because I was making art so that other people would think I was good or cool or for validation. But then I was like, “Well, why am I making art?” And I learned that I have to make art that I want to make and that the validation that I seek is my own.
Because when you think about it, if you try to picture somebody’s face is like, who’s approval is it that I need? Probably can’t really come up with anyone. And so my work shifted around then and I began really truly making art for myself. And that was hammered home in my final year of college when my mum, who had been sick for my whole life, she passed away. And at that moment, I was old enough to understand the magnitude of it, but young enough to still be malleable to have not fully become the person that I was to become. And suddenly everything fell away. All the things that I thought were important and all the issues that I thought were important and other people’s opinions just dropped away, and I could just suddenly see quite clearly what was important. And I, from that moment on, began striving towards that.
Debbie Millman:
You got your degree in college and in art school in visual communication, and did that initially in an effort to find a job, but realized in college-
Oliver Jeffers:
That I’m unemployable.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you decided that you never wanted to actually work for anybody because you didn’t like being told what to do.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I think you learned that when you were working in a bookshop in college.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. I worked at a bookstore chain in Northern Ireland, and it worked well for me for a while because I could do the shop windows. And so I was doing these displays, and then the occasion time that I was put on the floor and was sort of being ordered around, it just didn’t sit well for me. I think more than once in the couple of years that I was there when somebody asked for something, I would say, “Oh, no, sorry, it’s my first day. I don’t know. Ask somebody else.” But that was actually the last job I ever had. Because I was coming into my last year of university, and the word from head office came down that they were going to uniform the window so they didn’t get to bespoke them, each person. And so I lost that little gig that I had of going into work and actually just making these installations in these windows. And then I think I lost all interest in gainful employment at that point.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to pursue a book deal with How to Catch a Star back in 2004? Talk about how that all ended up happening. Because in looking at the trajectory of your life from your origin story to that moment in 2004 when you got a book deal based on a book you had worked on in college, it seems as if this was effortlessly meant to be, and I know that it wasn’t. So talk about the details that led you to that defining moment in your life at that point.
Oliver Jeffers:
I took a year off of art college in between my third year and my final year and in that moment I was making paintings because I thought, I’m going to go off and I’m going to be a painter. And some of the concepts I was playing around with were playing with these impossibilities but mildly believable impossibilities rather than fantasy. And this one moment happened where I started painting or concepting a painting that was of somebody doing something that was physically impossible, which was trying to catch a star. And then I started making other paintings of other attempts to do that. And when I got back to college, I was thinking about the style in which I was doing it, and I started harking back to some of the simpler illustration styles that I’d been inspired by when I was a kid reading books. And at a certain moment, the penny just dropped.
And I’d been talking to a friend who had mentioned picture books and was suggesting that my skill set might lend itself to that. And I was sort of playing about with this concept, but rather than as a series of paintings, as a book. And it did, it kind of happened quite naturally that first time. I fell into it. And for college, I decided how close can I get to a finished book? And what ended up being the final product of that when I graduated, I thought this is as good as if not better than anything else I see in the bookshops out there. Now, the late ’90s, early 2000s was not a great time for a picture books. It was, I think a pretty bland period. So the competition was quite low. So I sent off my concept to publishers expecting months and months and months of, have you read it yet? Can I speak to somebody? But I did my research and I put together a little package that was really well considered. Because whoever says you never judge a book by its cover is … That’s wrong.
Debbie Millman:
Hasn’t been in the book business ever.
Oliver Jeffers:
Or in any business. Because we all do it every day in myriad ways. And I got a phone call, I think two days after sending an note from two different publishers, one in the USA and one in the UK, saying they wanted to publish this work. At that point, I realized that the book that I’d made in my final year was in water color, and I’d never used water color before. Why I chose water color, still don’t really know. But I was like, I think I can do a better job of that. So I did re-illustrate it, and then learned as I was going and the book published. They wanted to do a two-book deal so they asked me, “Do you have other books up your sleeve?” And I said, “Yeah, of course.” And I had no notion whatsoever. So the second book that I made was probably the hardest book I’ve ever had to make because I was making it from the start knowing it was going to be a book rather than falling into it.
Debbie Millman:
I know that you were particularly influenced in something that Maurice Sendak said about how he approached creating books for children, and he said, “You cannot write for children. They’re too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.” And so you started your career making picture books without really having any sense of how to make a picture book. You weren’t studying picture books, you weren’t involved in the production of picture books. What drew you to that form?
Oliver Jeffers:
I think the book in its simplicity is just the perfect vehicle for this relationship between words and pictures telling a story. And I went back and looked at some of the books that I enjoyed and seeing some of them was like, there’s real life concepts here, but they’re distilled down into such a pure form that they have to really know what they’re saying. And then this idea of reducing things back to simplicity was something that really appealed to me. But just what is the fewest amount of words you can use and what is the sparsest artwork you can use that conveys fully the emotion and the structure of the story? It just drew me, and I did have a knack for it that I don’t particularly know where it came from. But yeah, I think the one thing that Maurice Sendak said that I really gravitated towards was, “I don’t write books for children. I write books and somebody says they’re for children.”
And I don’t exactly do market research when I’m making a book. It’s not like I think, oh, I wonder what type of stories kids want to hear and then make towards that. I just really make books that I find satisfying and just going through the motions of the narrative arc is like, does this work? Does this not? And if I can make it work for me, and both me as an adult, but also the me as a child that I have just a tale memory of, that works for me.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that when artists combine image and words, it forms something that could be more powerful than just seeing the same content in a sentence or a paragraph or separately as a piece of art. And you said that people read images in a different way than they read words. So I’m wondering if in addition to talking about the specific form of a picture book, if you can talk a little bit about what happens in art or literature when words and image are combined in some way.
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, when words and image are combined in a book, you can use the words to contradict the images, or you can use them to say almost nothing, but they are a different ingredient rather than repeating themselves. And so really truly the only full coming together of the notion happens inside the head of whoever’s reading the book. And in that way, they then become a co-creator. So they’ve got an access point, they feel a sense of ownership, and they can project themselves into that. But we learn how to read pictures. We learn how to read faces and rooms way before we learn how to read words. It becomes, I think, much more intuitive. We’re visual people. And there’s only one way really to read a sentence, which is in a linear way, but with reading an art, it’s more cyclical. We do tend to have a flow of sweeping from left to right generally, but you can play with that in a non-obvious way by having the left-hand side image sparse, and then the right-hand side busy with some sort of focal point. And so there’s an ability to be able to play with the tone, the space, and the emotion of an image that then combined with words creates this subtle flow that you don’t even notice is happening.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your style a little bit. You talked about at the top of the show how you copied the comic and realized that your characters didn’t have any elbows and didn’t have any knees. They were very round rather than linear. But you are able to draw or paint almost anything realistically in great detail. So you have this sweeping capability. What made you decide to work in a way that is more fast, that’s more … I mean, I’m struggling to find the word because it isn’t really simplistic.
Oliver Jeffers:
Minimal.
Debbie Millman:
There’s a certain sense of ease to it.
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I could have made some of those paintings with a very realistic figure of a boy and very realistic background, but then I’m filling in all the detail and the reader doesn’t get the opportunity to do that. And what I didn’t intend, but have learned since is because the drawings were so simple, kids thought that they could make that, and they would, but also because the geography was so vague and just suggestive, and what is the fewest ingredients you need to put this so you have a sense that it’s on land and it’s a rough time of day, but no more. That everywhere I would go on book tour in those early days, the kids would think that the books were set where they were from. And that’s what happens when you do make it simple and you do leave out as many details as possible so that people can apply their own sense of self and their own story to it.
Debbie Millman:
You said that you normally find that the faster you draw something, the more charming it is because the more human it is.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. At that point, you’re drawing how that image feels rather than truly trying to depict the reality of it. And it happens every time, which is, I would always revert back to some of the early sketches. Well, I have a sense of how this page will look, and I’ll just sketch it out quickly, and then I try to do it much more detailed and I trip myself up with it loses that personality and it becomes tight, and that tightness is cold and it’s off-putting.
Debbie Millman:
And it’s so interesting how you can always tell when something is tight.
Oliver Jeffers:
You can. Overworked, overthought.
Debbie Millman:
Tortured. I call it tortured. And when I’m drawing anything, even if it’s just words that I’m drawing, I have to go through that torture phase before I get to the ease. And that’s some of the most torturous experiences that I go through these days. How do you get to that other side? How do you learn or how do you know when you’re drawing charm?
Oliver Jeffers:
Oh. I think does it convey the emotion that I think it needs to convey in a simple way and then mix in with that a quality of line. Does the drawing look good? And you could do something a couple of different times. Yeah, that one works slightly better. I think it’s intuition. I think, as I say, we all understand body language. We all understand somebody else’s facial expressions and the way that they’re sitting and the way that they’re moving, and we understand momentum in art. And it’s when it can do those things with just a couple of lines, there’s just a charm that comes with that. But how do you recognize that? I don’t know. Does it work? Yes. Move on.
Debbie Millman:
Well, not to belabor this … Because I am. I’m torturing with these questions because I’m so curious about them. You are able to convey charm in a letter form, and you’re able to convey charm in a shadow.
Oliver Jeffers:
I didn’t realize that I was able to do that, but my writing is my writing. I moved from a studio in West Belfast to a very tiny studio in New York, and there was not enough room to lay out the way that I had previously worked and so I was forced to contain, and I would put things away and put things in drawers so there was open space, and I would label those drawers, and I like the way my handwriting looked, and so I would just take a little more time and do it. And through the sketchbooks, I always loved that combination of words and pictures as a way to even make notes for myself. And the way that a word in a painting can change the meaning of the painting, not only the meaning, but also the visual aesthetic of it, because that becomes a focal anchor, a design anchor.
Say it’s all sort of abstract and sweeping or large, and it’s devoid of a focal point. You put a word in there, that word becomes that visual focal point, let alone the meaning. And so over time, I’ve enjoyed the way that my handwriting looks and would label things. People seem to be drawn to it, and then never being able to find the right type font that really quite worked for all my books and trying to learn how I could actually put my own writing into my books. Over time, it just became part of my visual language. And when I’m doing a very large book signing line, people always say, “Oh, your wrist must be hurting.” They say this often enough. I was like, “It’s my shoulder.” It’s because you draw from your shoulder, not from your wrist. And I suppose that then doesn’t really change the signal between your body and your brain if you’re working at scale or if you’re working small.
Debbie Millman:
Fascinating. I didn’t know that it comes from the shoulder.
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, I don’t know if it does for everybody, but for me it does.
Debbie Millman:
Since you were last on the show, you’ve worked on some extraordinary projects with a variety of clients, including now having a list of books that goes about 20 deep. In The Guardian many years ago, you stated that you define your work into three categories. The books you make, the paintings you do, and other. And I’m wondering if you still organize it that way.
Oliver Jeffers:
No. The books I make, the paintings I do, and other. I mean, maybe. There was a big separation for a long time. The books were over here, and the books were about storytelling, publishing. Almost joyous distraction in a way, entertainment. And then the art was about question asking and a totally different style that was open-ended and much more … I suppose I was trying to be highbrow, but there didn’t need to be any kind of a conclusion to those. And over the last 10 years, they’ve started to become closer together. Now, one of the reasons that I really leaned into figurative painting is because when I graduated from art college, got my book published and started becoming known as the picture book person, I would be sending my work off to galleries and they’d be interested until they realized like, oh, you’re the same person who does these illustrated kids books, and they would lose interest.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Oliver Jeffers:
Because I think back then illustrated kids books were not seen as sexy or fashionable, and there was this sort of ego and pompousness about the art world, which has changed massively in these last 20 years. But the illustration was sort of looked down upon, and especially picture books were looked down upon. As I say, it has changed. And the art world itself is less defined by you can only do one thing. So I deliberately kept them apart in one sense because I didn’t want to confuse people, but in another sense, the publishing contract did come very easily. And so I possibly maybe took that for granted a little bit.
And then because I couldn’t break through into this fine art thing, I valued it a lot more because despite that lesson of wanting external validation, clearly I was still seemingly, I need to be in this world.
So a lot of the time now, the concepts that I’ll come up with will manifest in multiple ways, including a book and including a project and they overlap massively. I have a difficult time defining the boundaries between them anymore. Other than that sometimes with a book, the final piece of art is the physical object that you hold in your hand. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the piece of paper looks like that the art is made on or the ingredients that are needed to get there. That’s really one of the only differences that there is no one single thing.
Debbie Millman:
A couple of years ago when that categorization was more in effect, one of the first projects that you became globally known for was the work that you did for U2, and with U2. The band U2. And is it true that you met Bono, the front man of U2, because his wife was reading your books to their kids?
Oliver Jeffers:
I’ve never heard that.
Debbie Millman:
Oh. I read that in some of my research. I thought that was so cool.
Oliver Jeffers:
That’s possible. I met him actually in a bar. A friend of mine worked with them, and I was trying to get them to move to another bar, and we were there and were like, “No, no. We got to wait for my boss to come.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And then the next thing, Bono comes in and sits down. He was like, “That’s Bono.” And so we’re talking and we just get into conversing about art. And he asked me what I did, and I says, “Well, I write and illustrate picture books.” And when I’ve said that before to people, they kind of go, “Oh, cool.” Don’t really know what else to say. But he said, “Wow, what a responsibility.” And I was like, “Whoa. How so?” And he goes, “Well, you’re a human being’s first counterpoint of their cultural world.”
And I just thought that was a very astute way of looking at it. We did get talking. I sent him an art book that I’d made at that point, and then he had asked me to start doing some small collaborations. Firstly, to be part of a workshop that he was doing at Ted’s. Because I was also at Ted that year doing the handwriting for it, which led to me making a film about the charity One.org, which then led to just working on a lyric video and a music video. I worked with my friend Mac Primo on those. And then just bit by bit, they just kept getting bigger and bigger because I think they liked what I did, and they valued my opinion and right up to the point where it meant working with Es Devlin on the Songs of Innocence and Experience doing these drawings that was recreating the youth that they had growing up in Dublin.
Debbie Millman:
And also the relationship that Bono had with his mother, Iris.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
What was it like to work with a band of the stature of U2 that I’m sure have very specific ideas about what they like and what they don’t like, and how did your own taste and your own desires to create something in line with your aesthetic choices, how did they merge?
Oliver Jeffers:
Beautifully. And one of the reasons that I kept working with them is that they treated me as a collaborator rather than a gun for hire. They were coming to me because they liked what I did, they liked the way that I thought, and they handled that with respect. So it was never a case of, oh, no, make that more U2 or make that more rock and roll, or whatever it was. There were conversations about, is this the best way to do this? Can we emphasize this point a bit more? But generally, it was very respectful and yeah, as I say, treated as an equal and as a peer and a collaborator rather than we’re paying you, do what we tell you.
Debbie Millman:
Did you ever have creative differences?
Oliver Jeffers:
No, not really, actually. Because they were concentrating on the music, and I think that’s one of the reasons that they work so well, is that they hire people whose work they respect and they trust in that.
Debbie Millman:
You are very much an artist in and of your own right. You write and illustrate your own books, you create your own art. Every once in a while, you do illustrate books that aren’t authored by you, and are longer than picture books.
One in particular that I wanted to talk to you about was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne. If you can talk a little bit about the subject of the book and your approach in doing this work, because it is really, in looking at the larger high altitude view of your work, it’s very different in its tone.
Oliver Jeffers:
It is. Until that point in my picture book career, there had been a likeness to everything. There was some poignancy, yes there, but there was a lightness to it. And the fine art that I was doing, the painting that I was doing, that was an exercise to explore some of the deeper and docker issues and themes that I was thinking about.
I know John Boyne. We met on the book fair circuit, can’t actually remember where, but we became friendly, and I had read that book and had a very, very powerful reaction to it.
And he was saying that it was the tenth anniversary edition coming up, and we just got talking and it was like, “Has that ever been illustrated?” And he said, no, he was actually, would I be interested in doing it?
And at that point, the film had just come out, and we both agreed that I should not watch the film, just because, if you watch the film and then you read the book, you can’t help but picture whoever the casting director has casted.
So I didn’t watch the film, and I just went through it, and was just thinking, again, trying to employ some of those visual language vocabulary techniques I’ve used, saying something with the barest amount of information, and keeping the colors very, very minimal. So there’s only charcoal ink, pencil drawings, so basically black and white, with a very few spots of red, and a very few spots of blue, kind of a sky blue.
And I tried to remove as much information, so oftentimes, when it’s Bruno, who’s the kid … Basically, the story is, I think he’s a 10-year-old boy whose father is a Nazi officer, who is asked to then run Auschwitz. And this becomes clear in his misunderstanding of the world, as he’s moved to the house next to the camp, and he sees the people behind the fence.
And then, because nobody explains to him what’s going on, so he makes up his own version, to the best of his understanding. And he sees a small boy, as he’s walking around the fence, and they become friends and they talk about what life is like in either way, and they decide to let’s find out.
So Bruno tries to sneak in, and I’m not going to ruin the ending of the book for anybody who hasn’t read it, but for example, whenever it’s the picture depicting whenever Hitler comes to the house with his famous actress, girlfriend, wife, whose name I-
Debbie Millman:
Eva Braun.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yes. I depicted Hitler just with a square in the middle of his face, which was his mustache. And I depicted Eva Braun with just the red lips of the lipstick. And then, I depicted, I can’t remember the name of the young officer who becomes very violent, just always with this shadow under his cap, and then, these piercing blue eyes, sort of that idea of the Aryan purity, and these explosions of color every once in awhile, just to be able to show the emotion of the story, and as simple but beautiful as a way as possible.
Debbie Millman:
What did working on that book do to your spirit?
Oliver Jeffers:
I had to do a lot of research for it, to understand what Auschwitz looked like. Now I studied World War II in history at A level, so I knew my way around that period of history, and I’ve seen the images, but then, really looking at the images, because you have to draw them.
I think I made a post at the time, just saying, that things like this are important to remember, so that we don’t repeat them. There was a heaviness, that kind of permeated over me, the entire time that I was working in that book. And I think possibly, at that time, I was working on Stuck. And I needed that lightness to balance that darkness.
Debbie Millman:
If you look at this overarching, again, narrative arc of your work, so much of it, even when discussing difficult things, discussing climate change, deciding the future, talking about the future of humanity and illustrating the future of humanity, the work is very light and hopeful.
This was one case in your work, where I felt that it was very dark, and that was startling to me. And I was wondering what that might have done to your psyche, while you were working on it.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. And actually, at that point, I think I was beginning the experimentation with the dip paintings, and I thought that there was going to be a darkness in that, because that whole project is about exploring death.
Debbie Millman:
And memory, what we do and don’t remember.
Oliver Jeffers:
And memory, and how the two are related, and how the idea of knowing that life is finite, how that changes how you project yourself into a completely unknown future. It ultimately became more of a project about memory and storytelling, and the vulnerability of memory, than anything else. So that the people that I would paint these portraits of, they were all linked by the experience of having witnessed death firsthand, and in different ways.
Sometimes, it would have been somebody had lost a parent, or sometimes a partner. One of them was an EMT driver who would discover dead bodies. One of them actually was a government assassin, who had killed in cold blood, and seeing what the similarities were with that proximity to death.
The paintings themselves are beautiful. And there’s this, I think, a deep hope that kind of permeates from it. But doing some of those interviews was heavy.
Debbie Millman:
For somebody that hasn’t seen your drip paintings, how do you describe them?
Oliver Jeffers:
They would be typically portraiture painting, like oil painting, in a frame. But the entire bottom three-quarters is a solid color, because I would have painted these portraits, and then I would submerge them into a lot of paint, to permanently obscure the majority of them.
And I would do it in front of a small audience, and no photographs would ever exist of the entirety of the painting. The future of that legacy would exist only in the minds of the people who were there.
So I would ask them afterwards what they remember seeing, and then I would ask them months, sometimes years later, about what they still remember seeing, and just how much changes
Debbie Millman:
Having witnessed one, and it was the drip painting of John Maeda, because I knew the experience of watching the painting being dipped would require my remembering certain things. I became hyper aware of the buttons on his shirt, the color of the shirt, the expression on his face, and so forth. But all these years later, the only things I remember are those things that I just mentioned.
Oliver Jeffers:
It changes the way you look at something.
Debbie Millman:
But that’s all I remember. I couldn’t tell you if you had specific questions about other things.
Oliver Jeffers:
What way was he facing?
Debbie Millman:
I couldn’t tell you, but I could tell you about the button. I can tell you about the button, and that’s about it. So it’s interesting what we deem memorable in the moment.
I was trying to stuff my head with facts about it, so that I could remember more. And in fact, I think I’ve remembered less.
Oliver Jeffers:
Because you were trying to remember?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. It’s been such an interesting experience doing those. One of the sitters I was painting … People ask me, do I have an emotional experience, when I’m doing them? And the answer is yes, but in a different way than everybody else is.
I’m having an emotional experience, because of the collective, I suppose, mood, the collective emotion in the room. But I’m also worried that I’m not going to kick a can of paint over, remember what I have to say, the technicalities of it.
And when I was painting one of the sitters in the studio, and that’s a strange experience, if you’ve ever had your portrait painted, and especially as somebody who’s painting the portrait, you stare at somebody for an uncomfortably long time, but you’re not looking at them. You’re looking at some small, again, detail.
So I was with this sitter, and I kind of did a little laugh, and he goes, “What was that about?” And I was like, “Oh, well, I suppose I’ve just finished painting your ear. It’s probably the best ear I’ll ever paint.” And then, I thought, “Oh, well …”
Debbie Millman:
John Singer Sargent be damned.
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, yeah. And then, I thought, “Oh, well it’ll be gone soon.”
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Oliver Jeffers:
And I’ll go through the emotion of it while making the painting.
Debbie Millman:
Would you say that your career as an artist has been fighting against the portraiture, the sort of deep detail and finesse that’s required in portraiture, that you’re so good at, and yet, really have in many ways rejected?
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah. Have we talked about this?
Debbie Millman:
No.
Oliver Jeffers:
Every time I start a new painting, or go into a direction of a body of work, I was, “I’m going to be loose this time. I want to be big, and I want to be loose.” And I invariably keep getting back to being tighter at that scale. And I somehow can’t find the freedom and energy that happens intuitively, with the book art, on a large scale painting.
There’s just something there where I keep having to … I don’t know. I’m learning how to trust myself, and it’s still something that I strive towards. So one of the pieces of advice that I give myself is, “Just use a bigger brush.”
Debbie Millman:
Ooh, interesting. So interesting, because in the video you did for you too, I was actually marveling at how well your handwriting worked in a large scale, when you were writing on walls of buildings, and in walls at your studio. And I was wondering how that felt to you.
Oliver Jeffers:
The handwriting has never been an issue at scale. When I write big on a painting, or on a wall, it still looks the same as I do when I write small, but it’s always the image making. I use acrylic sometimes, I use oil sometimes, and with both of them, they have their pros and their cons.
With acrylic at a small scale, there’s an immediacy and a charm to that. But when you apply that large, just something in my head, I can never get the colors quite right, or it dries too fast. And then, with oil paint, it’s almost the opposite problem.
So I think everybody is learning, always, as they grow and they develop, and figuring out both what their body is capable of, what their head is capable of, but also what the materials are capable of.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting to be so close to watching your trajectory as an artist.
Oliver Jeffers:
Wow.
Debbie Millman:
It’s a real privilege.
Oliver Jeffers:
Oh, thank you.
Debbie Millman:
There were two projects I want to talk to you about, before we get to your current book. In your film, Here We Are, the protagonist is a precocious seven-year-old who, over the course of a day, learns about the wonders of the planet from his parents, and a mysterious exhibit, aptly named, The Museum of Everything.
And you said this. “Here We Are, of all my books, seems the most relevant for the world’s current reality, as it began as a sort of comedic routine in pointing out the obvious. But slowly, it dawned on me, the importance of re-remembering the basic principles of what it is to be alive on this earth, and appreciate it right now.” So I’m wondering, what motivated that re-remembering?
Oliver Jeffers:
The book Here We Are is the first book I’ve ever made that’s not a story, it’s a set of observations. It’s quite literally coming home from the hospital, with a two-day-old baby, and figuring out, what do we do now, figuring out how to introduce him to the world. As somebody who’s an over talker and oversharer, I just began narrating everything I saw around me, thinking it was really funny.
It was like, “Welcome home, son. This is your front door to the apartment that you live in, the apartment is one house in a bigger building. Buildings are these things that we make.” And really, just entertaining myself by pointing out all the things that he could see. And around that time, the world was angrier and scared than usual.
Now, maybe I was seeing it from the different perspective of being a parent for the first time, so suddenly aware of the world that he’s walking into, and that I’m responsible, really and truly for the first time, for somebody other than myself.
But in 2015, when he was born, that was when the Brexit vote was happening in the UK, and that was very divisive. And it was the first year that Trump was beginning to run for election here. Everything seemed polarized, and there was a lot of anger and blame and division, and the consensus was that everything is falling, sliding backwards somehow.
As I was explaining the world to him, I wanted to change the way in which I was explaining it. I didn’t feel that it was going to be, even though he couldn’t understand a word I was saying, I was like, “I want to tell you the good things before we get to this. There’s night and there’s day. This is the only place in the universe where people live. There are people, and people come in all shape, sizes and colors, and we may all look different, act different and sound different, but don’t be fooled, we’re all people.”
And just the simple truths, that I’m sort of trying to remind him of the beauty of what it is to be alive, here and now.
As I was writing him this letter, it occurred to me that maybe other people would benefit from re-remembering these things that I was re-remembering. So it became the book, Here We Are, which is this, it’s almost a guidebook for new arrivals on Earth.
Debbie Millman:
Or for re-remembering what is important.
Oliver Jeffers:
Or for re-remembering. The editor at the time joked, he said, “This is a book for new people, new parents, and misplaced adults.”
Debbie Millman:
How did you translate that to a film?
Oliver Jeffers:
Actually, with difficulty. Because, so Apple TV wanted to do an adaptation of it, as a half hour short. Because there’s no story in the book, they were saying, “that this is going to be an educational film, if we just stick with this list of observations.” So we were looking for a way in, we were looking for a narrative.
Philip Hunt, who was the director at Studio AKA, heard me give the anecdote of giving my son the tour of the apartment, and then, the, “Wow, he really knows nothing.” And then, that changing to, “He really knows nothing. We’re going to have to teach him everything.” And that became a bit of the idea of the story.
But the theme and the emotional heart of the story came from this idea of the book trying to point to a true north for people who felt lost. So in the endpapers of the book, there is that, “This is how you find your way home. This is north.”
They decided, “That’s what we can make the arc of the film about. Let’s take this, not as a baby, but age him seven years, and have it be this one day, where it’s about this idea of truly understanding the magnitude of everything, feeling lost by it, but using that as an opportunity to bring it back to a simple core truth.”
Debbie Millman:
And a way forward.
Oliver Jeffers:
And a way forward, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Which, I think, is the common denominator between both the book and the film. The film is narrated by Meryl Streep, and includes the voices of Chris O’Dowd, Ruth Negga, Jacob Tremblay. What was it like to see and hear your ideas come to life in this way?
Oliver Jeffers:
Yeah, bizarre. I was secretly hoping I’d be cast. No, I’m joking. Chris O’Dowd was my idea, and whenever he said yes, I was like that, “It’s perfect.” He’s just got that right amount of charm and humor.
Of course, Meryl Streep as Mother Earth, it was pretty perfect. That was a beautiful moment. It was, of course, supposed to get a big premiere in California, but that happened right in the middle of-
Debbie Millman:
COVID.
Oliver Jeffers:
COVID, so that got pulled.
Debbie Millman:
But you did win an Emmy, so you’re on your way to an EGOT. The last project before we talk about your current book is the poster you worked on with Darren Aronofsky for his film, The Whale.
I’d love to talk to you about that, and get an understanding about how that came to be. The poster that you made was quite different than the film that was used in mass production, far more beautiful, far more subtle. Just was wondering about your approach to doing that project.
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, that came from a conversation with Darren. Darren kindly agreed to come over to Belfast speak at this festival I was putting around this giant sculpture project of Earth’s place in the solar system, and talking about using the microcosm, as a way to look at the microcosm.
He spoke brilliantly, and we were hanging out, and I was showing him around Belfast, and he was saying about this new project, and we talked about the idea of doing a piece of art for it, and we talked about the film, but I hadn’t seen it. And I was like, “I think I have an idea, right off the bat.”
I sketched it out, and it was like, “I love this.” The premise of the film is a girl who’s reconnecting with her father, who is close in the last week of his life, and he’s obese, and I can’t remember, like 600 pounds, when they can’t really leave his apartment, but there’s this sort of sad story about them trying to reconnect. And it’s called The Whale.
Now, of course, the whale is not a reference to him. But it’s more of a reference to Moby Dick, which is a story that he keeps reading over and over and over again.
And I had just this immediate flash of a concept, which is paint the surface of the sea, and then, below the sea, you see this sofa with this whale sitting in it, that’s got human legs, on a breathing machine, and then, this girl in a scuba outfit who is there, but distant. It’s like, she’s come from one world into his world, but there’s still this distance between them.
Debbie Millman:
But she’s also trying to communicate with him, to try to find a way in. How was the work utilized in the making of the film, and in the promotion.
Oliver Jeffers:
It was used as promotion afterwards. It was a limited edition print that went out. Actually, when I got to see the film for the first time at the premier, so not before, and that really, then, the penny sort of dropped about what the film was about. It was like, “Wow, this is kind of even more apt, than not.”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I saw a very early screening. And I can tell you, that when I first saw your poster, I was astounded, how you could see into the film, without even having seen the film?
Oliver Jeffers:
But maybe that was, rather than having seen the film, I talked to Darren. So we didn’t talk about the film, per se, but we talked about the idea and the themes and the emotions of the film. Almost without that excess information, it allowed me to see what I wasn’t supposed to do.
Debbie Millman:
You just published your brand new book, Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. I have one big question for you about this.
Oliver, you’ve sold over 15 million children’s books. What made you decide to write one targeted to people of all ages?
Oliver Jeffers:
I never set off to do anything, thinking, “Here’s who this is for,” and I’m doing this, because I think, as I say, “people will like it, and this is going to hit the current trend or market or anything.”
It’s the second book that I’ve made that’s not a story, it’s a list of observations. Though, in thinking now about it, those observations started 45 years ago. They really had started to take root over the last 15 years, when I moved from Northern Ireland to New York, and then, since moving back from New York to Northern Ireland, where I’m part-time based now, that’s when I started actively trying to take these patterns that I could see that were rippling out in society in many ways, and look at them from a long enough lens view, to make sense of them somehow.
So a lot of the work that I do is about perspective. It’s about taking a step back, and looking at something from far away, or back through time, rather than just the microcosm of this moment in this time.
So the Our Place in Space sculpture project that I was referencing a second ago, it was about human conflict where it, in Northern Ireland, we have been at that conflict culturally, less violently over the last few years. But the Belfast that I grew up in was a very violent place, and it was very divided between an us-them mentality between Catholics and Protestants.
And then, moving to New York, and trying to explain to well-educated people that, “No, actually, I’m not from Ireland, it’s Northern Ireland, which is a different country,” and people really not knowing or understanding, and truth that I learned, was not really caring, either.
It just made me look back at home in a different way, and it just seemed like a tragic, poignant waste of time and energy, all of this, what was all consuming, in terms of identity. When I was making Here We Are, a big part of that book was if you’re giving a human being a tour of our planet, you start off with location.
So I started looking at Earth’s place in space, and I was reading about how astronauts speak about looking at Earth from a distance, and came across the overview effect. I could see that the way I was describing Northern Ireland, from the distance of New York, was not unlike the way that astronauts were describing looking at the earth from the Moon, where there’s some of those famous quotes like, “It makes you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, and drag him a quarter of a million miles away, and say, ‘Look at that.'”
This idea of the separation, of these manmade borders, these lines, these stories that we’ve constructed, that really keep each other apart, it just seems like not the best use of our time. When I then moved back to Northern Ireland from here, I was quite really shocked, watching the 2020 election campaign, and how even more brutal it was becoming, and could suddenly see, because I was in Belfast at that point, that it felt like the USA was where Northern Ireland was in the 1970s, where one group’s identity was defined by the existence of somebody else, by the existence of a perceived enemy.
That really got me thinking about, “Well, why do people think like that? In Northern Ireland, why do we do what we do? What is it people actually truly want?” And asking those questions, “What is it that people truly want,” why do we go against our own best interest, time and time again? And at that point, it was impossible to have a conversation about US politics that was not just explosively conflictual. And.
I’ve been all around the USA on book tours, and I’ve met all sorts of people, and I’ve sort of joked, that I was like, “I’ve never really met anybody who wants to be an asshole.” There’s just people who double down on a misunderstanding that happened about how they have been perceived. And it was like, “Can I ask a question, in a sincere enough way, that people will answer it in a non-defensive way?”
So I put up the social media post, saying, “Calling all Republicans, can you please,” because I know many Republicans that who, have basically I believe the same set of values that I do, “Why is this becoming so polarized? Please explain to me the world that you want, without mentioning anything you don’t want.”
Because, in these conversations, people just tend to go towards what they don’t want, in a negative sense. We all begin with this sense of defensiveness and negativity. So it’s preemptive, that when somebody speaks to you from the other perspective, that it’s an attack. How could you mitigate that, and have a genuine conversation?
So, when trying to really truly understand, I asked people on the other side of the political spectrum to me, to describe the word that they do want, rather than the word they don’t. And the discourse that happened afterwards proved, I think, my gut intuition that we’re all just so busy trying to be understood, that we forget to try and understand.
And it led to the creation of the poem at the end of Begin Again. And then, in taking that into consideration about, a lot of the issues that draw most people’s time and attention are actually massive distractions away from what we should be worrying about, which is making sure that life can continue to survive on this planet. So, streaming all of these different thoughts and experiences that I’ve had, and observations that I’ve made about the stories that people tell themselves, led to Begin Again.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about how one of the goals in creating Begin Again was to create a single narrative about who we are, in an effort to collaborate and address the many crises we are facing. Do you think it’s possible to have a single narrative about who we are now?
Oliver Jeffers:
To answer that question, think about the way people say that New York City is, it’s a great melting pot. That’s not true. Because that would imply homogenization, that everybody’s the same. New York is a giant salad. It’s made up of all different ingredients, but it works together, somehow.
That’s more what I mean about this. It’s almost the same set of goals, morals, and values of what we’re being driven towards. Now, the way in which I think a lot of this has happened, is that things have just accelerated so massively, so quickly, that we can’t really keep up with things anymore. This is the first time that we are aware of all other groups, all other cultures really, truly.
And we are also aware of everything that is happening everywhere at once instantaneously. It’s a bombardment, and an overwhelming sense of information and knowledge, and we need to grasp onto something that just allows us to know where we are.
And because we’re coming out of this period of, I suppose, consumerism, where it’s all just about, “Stuff will make you happy.” We’re learning now, and we see now, that stuff doesn’t make you happy. It’s actually other people that make you happy.
And that can, I think, be one of the stories that we can all rally around, is then, the things that people do want, what came out of that social media post, which sort of ended up in the poem, was that it’s all human beings want safety. They want community, they want dignity, and they want purpose. And everything else is just leveraged towards that.
Those should be accomplishable, that should be accomplishable. I think we can all agree that we want life on Earth to continue, and to exist, and that is the single story that we should get behind, instead of where we are now.
And this is the one thing that I learned about in Northern Ireland, trying to apply why people do go against their own best interests is, we have somehow got to a point where being right is the most important thing. We prioritize being right over wrong more than anything else.
But if we replace the words “right” and “wrong” in any conflict or debate with “better” and “worse,” it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen. And it’s not, then, about ego or self, or the past, or justifying the past. It’s about, “Well, what do we do now? How do we make this better?”
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I like most about Begin Again is the notion that, in order for us to really truly survive and thrive, is to become part of the same powerful plot. What do you envision that powerful plot being?
Oliver Jeffers:
I think I envision that powerful plot being, so we started off as villages, and then we grew to towns, and then to cities, and then nations. And maybe the next natural progression is land.
I have multiple passports, which I probably shouldn’t advertise. People ask me where I’m from, and it was like, the easiest answer was, “I’m a citizen of planet Earth, man.”
And that is, again, sort of easy and idealistic to say. But that one, same powerful plot, I think, is the awareness that we feel better, when we know we matter and we fit in. So it’s a return to the sense of community.
A little anecdote I’ve been telling about the real snap of that, the inception of the moment of Begin Again is, when I was back in Northern Ireland, right before lockdown hit there, but you could see it was coming. I got talking to this old lady waiting to cross the road, with a couple of big bags of shopping, and I asked her, “Oh, you’re getting ready for the lockdown?” And she said, “Yes.”
I said, “Do you think it’s going to last for a long time?” She said, “You know, I think it is. Because for awhile, I thought this was going to remind me of the war,” she said. She was around during World War II, and Belfast was heavily bombed in World War II, because we made all the planes and the ships for the British Army.
She goes, “I thought this was going to remind me of back in the war, but it’s not. Because back then, we all tried to see how we could help. But look around, everybody’s just trying to see what they can get away with.”
How do we return back to that sense of, “How can I help?” Or as Nicole Stott, the astronaut says, “How can we go from being passengers on this spaceship earth to being its only crew?”
Debbie Millman:
What do you see as the difference between being a passenger and part of the crew?
Oliver Jeffers:
“What’s in it for me?” Versus, “How can I help? I have a job to do here,” versus, “I’m here to tick. This is all from my convenience.”
Debbie Millman:
So what can everyone do to make everything better for everyone else?
Oliver Jeffers:
I think we have to remember the importance of community.
Debbie Millman:
You conclude the book with a beautiful piece of poetry, and I’m wondering if you can share that with us today.
Oliver Jeffers:
I will happily share that, yes.
Debbie Millman:
And give us maybe a little bit of backstory, as to how you arrived at this part of the book.
Oliver Jeffers:
Well, it was in the deep question asking of a lot of people, everywhere I went, what they actually wanted, how they felt now, versus how they wanted to fail. This real sense of understanding is that we are all collectively chasing the wrong things.
We’re using the wrong measuring stick to value success. And in remembering that we as animals are actually much more simple creatures than we give ourselves credit for. So it’s called The Heart of It.
When you dig deep enough, by asking the why behind the why enough times, you come to a truth at the heart of it. That all people, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what they believe, just want the same things. A den, a pack, position, and direction.
Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Oliver Jeffers:
Thank you, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Oliver Jeffers’ latest book is Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go, Our Human Story So Far. You can find out about all the other things he’s been up to on his website, oliverjeffers.com.
This is the eighteenth year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both.
I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the Ted Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.